Solaris () is a 1961 science fiction novel by Polish writer Stanisław Lem. It follows a crew of scientists on a hovering near-surface research facility as they attempt to understand an extraterrestrial intelligence, which takes the form of a vast ocean on the titular alien planet. The novel is one of Lem's best-known works.

The book has been adapted many times for film, radio, and theater. Prominent film adaptations include Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 version and Steven Soderbergh's 2002 version, although Lem said that the films shifted away from the book's thematic emphasis on the limitations of human rationality.

Plot summary

Solaris chronicles the ultimate futility of attempted communications with the extraterrestrial life inhabiting a distant alien planet named Solaris. The planet is almost completely covered with an ocean of black, gelatinous material that forms a single, planet-encompassing entity. Terran scientists conjecture it is a living and sentient being, and attempt to communicate with it.

Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, arrives aboard Solaris Station, a scientific research station hovering near the oceanic surface of Solaris. The scientists there have studied the planet and its ocean for many decades, mostly in vain. A scientific discipline known as Solaristics has degenerated over the years to simply observing, recording and categorizing the complex phenomena that occur on the surface of the ocean. Thus far, the scientists have only compiled an elaborate nomenclature of the phenomena, and do not yet understand what they really mean. Shortly before Kelvin's arrival, the crew exposed the ocean to a more aggressive and unauthorized experimentation with a high-energy X-ray bombardment. Their experimentation gives unexpected results and becomes psychologically traumatic for them as individually flawed humans.

The ocean's response to this intrusion exposes the deeper, hidden aspects of the personalities of the human scientists, while revealing nothing of the ocean's nature itself. It does this by materializing physical simulacra (including human ones) based on the unpleasant repressed memories of the researchers, who visit the corresponding researchers. Kelvin confronts memories of his dead lover and guilt about her suicide, which constitutes a significant part of the plot. The "visitors" of the other persons are only alluded to.

All efforts to make sense of Solaris's activities prove futile.

Characters

  • Dr. Kris Kelvin, is a psychologist recently arrived from Earth to the space station studying the planet Solaris. He had previously been cohabiting with Harey ("Rheya" in the Kilmartin–Cox translation), who died by suicide.
  • Snaut ("Snow" in the Kilmartin–Cox translation) is the first person Kelvin meets aboard the station.
  • Gibarian, who had been an instructor of Kelvin's at university, killed himself just hours before Kelvin arrives at the station.
  • Sartorius is the last inhabitant Kelvin meets.
  • Harey ("Rheya" in the Kilmartin–Cox translation, an anagram of "Harey"), who kills herself with a lethal injection after quarreling with Kelvin and later her copy reappears at the space station, apparently produced by the Ocean of Solaris.

Commentary

The novel is the best known elaboration of Lem's trope of the impossibility of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence, present in many of Lem's novels, including his first, The Man from Mars, and his last, Fiasco.

As Lem wrote, "the peculiarity of those phenomena seems to suggest that we observe a kind of rational activity, but the meaning of this seemingly rational activity of the Solarian Ocean is beyond the reach of human beings." Lem also wrote that he deliberately chose to make the sentient alien an ocean to avoid any personification and the pitfalls of anthropomorphism in depicting first contact. to anticommunism, proponents of the latter view holding that the Ocean represents the Soviet Union and the people on the space station represent the satellite countries of Central and Eastern Europe. He also commented on the absurdity of the book cover blurb for the 1976 edition, which said the novel "expressed the humanistic beliefs of the author about high moral qualities of the human". Lem noted that the critic who promulgated the Freudian idea actually blundered by basing his psychoanalysis on dialogue from the English translation, whereas his diagnosis would fail on the idioms in the original Polish text.